Cleaning Up and Helping Out

Our veranda was intact and steady. Carli helped me as I hung rugs over the banister and put mattresses out in the increasing sunshine. We sopped up water from furniture and mopped floors as best we could without using fresh water.

Once the dining room table was dry, Carli and I emptied the bookcase, standing our cherished books and the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, my Mother’s Harvard Classics, and the children’s Book of Knowledge upright, opened to let pages dry. My impromptu shelter-by-shower-curtain had kept them from being soaked. Most of the books dried, stained with honorable hurricane mementos but with pages separate and readable.

Surprisingly, clothes in closets and dresser drawers were dry and undamaged. So were linen-closet stores.

 

We all tired early the evening after the storm, partly from aborted sleep the night before, partly from excitement, and partly from relief. Bucher brought the cot up from the downstairs storeroom and we made it up for Alex in Carli’s room. She had no glass in her windows, but most of the louvered blinds were intact.

Our bedroom was not usable and the Hide-a-Bed in the living room was still saturated with muddy water. We put our mattress on the floor of the living room, made it up with dry mattress pad and sheets, and collapsed in grateful exhaustion. That night, and for many that followed, squalls punctuated the darkness. The rain came in through the living room ceiling. Our peripatetic mattress was moved from site to site as we sought new locations that would remain dry for more than a few restless moments.

On November 1st, Bucher and I awoke at dawn with a sinking realization of the work ahead to repair storm damage. Coffee helped. By the time the children arose, our addled brains had organized themselves.

 

Alex assigned himself the primary task of building a ladder where the back stairs used to be so we could get in and out of the house more easily. Bucher went off to try to find materials and men to repair the open roof. That was the published purpose of his expedition; the true one was that he wanted to see first-hand the condition of the city, and I was equally eager for a reliable report.

Carli, a capable and mature nine-year-old, worked with me in the house. Once the floors had dried, we swept—and swept—and swept. It was months before the last of the powdery hurricane mud disappeared.

The hurricane mud gave off a pungent odor unlike any we ever had smelled. It was sharp, acidic, pervasive. It haunted us for years, as long-stored objects or forgotten files emerged with their aura of the never-forgotten smell. We learned that a main ingredient was tannic acid in the mahogany chips on which the city of Belize had been settled. The mud came from the shallow, silty bottom of the sea surrounding the peninsula that was Belize City. It was dark gray in color, slimy in consistency, and somewhere between distasteful and compelling in scent.

 

Watching the activities of our children and their neighborhood friends was heartwarming. The young ones went into action finding the treasures that had washed into their yards. Wearing heavy rubber boots and muddy blue jeans, the children searched gingerly for easily retrieved items. When an owner claimed something, it was relinquished happily or, sometimes, traded. A passing fireman paused to compliment the children on the clean-up job they were doing.

To Alex’s delight, receding waters left two dories stranded in our yard. The larger one was neatly painted POLICE and was retrieved quickly by a passing constable. No one claimed the other, so Alex appropriated it provisionally for himself. It partially made up for the discovery of recognizable parts of his skiff in a pile of debris a block away.

Alex and Carli proudly brought home their finds. Alex presented me with three wonderfully useful five-gallon jerry-cans. He found a shovel, an oil can, a quart of motor oil. Carli brought home a tin of dusting powder, a tin of paint, and a galvanized bucket. They located a two-burner kerosene stove, though they had to have adult help to pull it from under the debris.

Both children worked from dawn to dark, like adults. They were an enormous help to Bucher and me. Alex and Carli both “liberated” several empty fifty-five-gallon drums. Alex used a cold chisel and hammer to take the tops off two of them. He scoured them with sand and seawater and I finished the job with Mr. Clean and fresh water. We set them under the eaves to catch rain water to supplement our dwindling supply.

Together Alex and Carli cleaned up under the house, piling usable lumber, guttering, and pipe neatly, throwing rubbish into the sea, and raking up the seaweed. It might not have passed garden-club inspection, but made us feel dignified again.

At Bucher’s suggestion, Alex rigged a block-and-tackle on the veranda, using pulleys and rope from our vanished boats, so that he and Carli could fill jerry cans with sea water for flushing the toilet, and we could haul them directly up instead of someone’s having to lug them up a ladder, then up a flight of stairs.

It was amazing how quickly the house returned almost to normal.

 

Digging out from the hurricane was a crushing job. However, it was lump-in-the-throat-making to see the swift help British Honduras received. Mexico had planes in the country almost before the storm ended, with boats following more slowly. The British sent reinforcements from their Army Garrison in Jamaica, aboard Naval vessels. The United States sent planes by the dozens, ships, and an aircraft carrier with a fleet of helicopters that were invaluable in reaching isolated villages.

Almost immediately the city was peopled by soldiers and sailors, sleeves rolled up, picking up and digging out, beginning the long task of renewing the battered capital.

 

Within a few days after the hurricane, British Army medical personnel set up an inoculation station in the Baron Bliss Institute just up the Southern Foreshore from our house. That was the first time my needle-allergic husband ever himself suggested going to get shots. The four of us walked down and lined up for our “jooks,” as British Honduran children said.

We met Lorena and Claudie Bradley standing in line, people we had known in business and at the club since we first arrived in Belize. They were tattered, dazed, almost speechless. Their house had gone and they had lost everything but the clothes they were wearing. We helped them get their shots, then took them home with us.

I raided the closets and collected a reasonable supply of clothes for their immediate use while Bucher provided more immediate aid in the form of a precious liquid bottled in Scotland.

A surprisingly short time after the hurricane, Claudie had sorted out his affairs, invested in equipment, and with Lorena’s help opened a fine little butcher shop called Sunshine Delicatessen.

 

Bucher’s freezer plant had a good supply of frozen chickens when the hurricane hit. The next day he began giving them away. Bucher asked for an armed guard and insisted that the crowd waiting for chickens must form an orderly line. When they pushed forward in a mob, he locked the doors and refused to hand out any more that day. He also noted troublemakers and refused to give them anything. From then on, for as long as the temperature in the freezers remained low enough to hold the chickens safely, Bucher distributed them regularly to a surprisingly quiet crowd.

Bucher brought a large bag of chickens home. I cooked two and the children delightedly delivered the rest to neighbors.

 

Hurricane Hattie gave Alex and Carli a matchless lesson in how people behave under stress. We did not need to preach; the children themselves remarked that people they would have expected to bull their way through undaunted often were the ones who turned into aimless idiots for days, while the most unlikely people showed miraculous resources of courage and strength.

One acquaintance whom Bucher and I both had considered to be a spoiled, selfish rich-man’s-son was one of the first to go to work digging out his store, laughing and helping others. Another man we would have expected to take things in stride wandered around in a semi-daze for almost a week, telling his troubles to anyone who was polite enough to listen.

The people who lost homes, businesses, everything had a perfect right to be stunned. But it was hard to stomach the sight of a father and son moaning to each other for almost two weeks, as if the hurricane had singled them out, and not lifting a finger even to dig the muck out of their store.

 

Many merchants were firm in their belief that nothing should be touched until the insurance adjuster had seen it. In a storm of this scope, that could be weeks. Meanwhile, perfectly salvageable things were spoiling; the stench and contamination, increasing. When the first adjuster arrived from England, he made it clear to a meeting of town businessmen that they should get busy and start digging out.

“If you think I am going to wade through mud to inventory your stock for you, bean by bean, you are bonkers.”

When the adjuster lightly mentioned that failure to salvage their property to the best of their ability could be grounds for cancellation of the policy, he lit fires under the worst of them.